"And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil."--ST.
MATTHEW vi. 13.
It is good for us sometimes to stand still for a moment and consider our
use of very familiar words. And this petition may appropriately
illustrate our need of such an exercise.
It is on your lips every day. Every Sunday you offer it you hardly know
how many times, in private and in public prayer: "Lead us not into
temptation, but deliver us from evil." And the moment you stop to think
about it you feel--who does not?--that it is a very solemn and moving
petition if you offer it before God in sincerity, and with an honest
desire to be kept out of the way of sin; but it becomes a fearful mockery
if it is offered with unclean lips, or by one who is living in any sort
of sinful practice, either secret or open.
And yet, as we all know, it is possible to do this, making the prayer
mere lip service, under the influence of daily custom. This, then, is
the question it suggests to us whenever we stop to think about it: How
far are we endeavouring to keep our lives in accordance with the spirit
of such a petition? "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from
evil." Most of you, I can well believe, would not voluntarily or
deliberately step out of your way to meet a temptation, or to seek any
evil course of life. You would not do it of your own free choice, or in
cold blood, as we say. This, at any rate, is your own feeling about sin,
whether the feeling is consistent with your life or not. As you
contemplate any low form of life in another, you recognise its ugliness
and its degrading character, and you call it very likely by the name it
deserves. If, then, you find yourself involved in any sin, in spite of
these feelings, and although you take this daily prayer upon your lips,
how comes it to be so? How comes it that you remain in this pitiable
condition?
Your answer is, perhaps, that temptation comes upon you unawares, and
that it takes you by surprise; or it seems to watch for some moment of
forgetfulness or weakness; or you fight against a temptation, but still
it clings to you as if it had a life of its own and were independent of
you; or you are drawn into sin you scarcely know how; or you are driven
into it by some one whom you fear although you despise him; or it seems
to you to be in the very air you breathe. And although such answers
explanatory of a life of sin or waste are no real excuse for it, they are
very often quite true. If it were not so, the devil would not be the
dangerous enemy that he assuredly is to our spiritual life; our risk of
failure in our battle with sin would not be so great as experience shows
it to be. We must therefore expect that temptations to sin will
sometimes come upon us quite by surprise and at unlocked for moments, and
that some temptations will linger and cling to us with a hateful
persistence; you must be prepared also to find that some companion may
draw you towards a sin, or a bully may endeavour to drive you into it.
Your life is a happy one if it is free from all such risks, but you
cannot count upon such freedom. So that, if any one begins his life
thinking that his conflict with evil and its manifold temptations is
going to be an easy one, he begins under a dangerous delusion, and he is
likely to end in some disastrous failure.
You desire, let us hope, to keep your soul unstained by evil ways. If,
then, you remember that to secure such a stainless and unpolluted life
you have not only to fight with some external enemy now and then, but
against dark and insidious powers of evil which seem to start up around
you and in the very citadel of your heart unawares, and that except
through a constant sense of God's presence in your life you cannot hope
to keep free from their influence, this feeling should give reality and
earnestness to our daily prayer to be delivered from the evil.
And, indeed, this feeling that our life is set in the midst of many and
great dangers is one of the first requisites for its moral safety. It
stands beside us with its warning, whenever a temptation to some sin
besets us, reminding us that, no matter how pleasant or attractive the
temptation may seem to be, or how trifling the sin that it suggests, it
is in fact an outpost of a great army, whose name is legion, and that we
should hold no parleyings and have no dealings with it, for it breathes
corruption, and it brings degradation and death behind it.
"_Obsta principiis_" may indeed be said to be a warning specially needed
by us in regard to every kind of temptation. But we may go further than
this. Our safety from particular sins depends very often and very
largely, at a critical moment, upon our general attitude and feeling
towards sin in every shape.
It must be acknowledged, I think, that most sins which lay their hold
upon us and master us, or struggle long and hard for the mastery, make
their first entrance into the soul so easily, because they find it swept
and garnished for their reception, and its doors wide open. With
reference to this you have only to reflect on some chapter of your own
experience. Has it never happened that, when some wrong or sinful act or
thought or speech was first presented to you, it stirred a feeling of
shrinking, or strong dislike, or fear, or uneasiness, or, it may be,
disgust; but instead of listening to that warning voice, and spurning the
temptation utterly, as your feeling bade you do, you were attracted
somehow to turn and gaze upon it. You knew it to be sin, but you felt no
repulsion. Your soul was not garrisoned and defended by any strong sense
of the hatefulness and deadly influence of all sin as such; so if you
fled from it it was with a backward look; and then you allowed yourself
to think of it in others, or you lived on friendly and familiar terms
with those who were stained by it; possibly you even jested about it; you
let your thoughts feed upon it; you expressed no stern disapproval of it;
you allowed the atmosphere of your life to be tainted by it; and at last
your adversary the devil, having rejoiced to see his wiles thus gathering
round you, saw you slip or plunge into the sin, and go one great step
nearer to becoming his bondslave--just as some foolish bird, fluttering
this way and that instead of spreading its wings for a heavenward flight
into the pure and safe upper air, might plunge into the snares of the
fowler. And yet all the while, although you were living this weak and
vacillating life, which is the seed-field of sin, you were praying to God
every day--"Lead us not into temptation."
If we remember any such experience we may at least gather from it some
lessons of safety and strength for the time to come. It reminds us first
of all how vitally important is our general attitude towards every form
of sin and its allurements. On this attitude it very often depends
whether your life is to be comparatively free from pitfalls, or whether
it is to be beset with dangers at every turning. If by your attitude and
behaviour you cause it to be felt that sin is hateful to you, and that
you are sincere when you pray that God may keep you from all evil, a
great many of the temptations that would otherwise make your life
difficult and dangerous will shrink away abashed; or if the tempter
ventures to assail you, he will do it half-heartedly when he sees that
you repel him with a whole-hearted repugnance. It is this attitude even
more than individual acts which fixes the tone of a society.
When there is no prevalent sense that there are those present who
maintain this attitude of hatred and contempt for sin and everything that
breeds or fosters it, the tone, as men say, becomes low, or lax, the air
becomes corrupt, and life in such surroundings becomes full of peril. If
the good are timid, shrinking, showing no positive fervour, no zeal for
virtue, and no moral indignation against evil influence, then the bad in
their society will lift up their heads and walk boldly. But when, on the
other hand, they who are in their hearts convinced of the sinfulness of
sin, and of the infinite mischief that may arise out of any form of it,
are not ashamed to show it by their attitude, they cause the base to hide
itself in its proper darkness, and they create an atmosphere around them
in which temptations lose a great deal of their force and strength.
Let this, then, be your feeling about your life--that when it is assailed
by any sin, that sin is not something isolated or insignificant; it is
not something which may be indulged or accepted, as if it had no relation
with other sins; it is a part of an infinite brood of evil; and that if
you admit it within the circle of your life, or tolerate it in the air
you breathe, you never know where its pestilent germs may fall, and
breed, and multiply, and what mischief may come of it.
It is this feeling of the mysterious vitality of sin, and the subtle
kinship of one form of sin with other forms, and its destructiveness when
it seizes on a life or poisons an atmosphere, that helps us more than
anything else to feel the force and the intensity of the Saviour's prayer
for us: "Holy Father, keep through Thine own name those whom Thou hast
given Me. I pray not that Thou shouldest take them out of the world, but
that Thou shouldest keep them from evil." It is this same feeling of the
spreading, insidious, infectious and destructive nature of sin that makes
us echo this as our first and most earnest prayer for all we love, that
God may keep them from evil; and it is this that makes us value so highly
and recognise with thankful hearts every example of a pure and strong
life, which gives inspiration and strength to those around it.